Out with the old; in with the new. Gerald Pfeifer’s nearly seven‑year run as chair ends with SUSE veteran Jeff Mahoney moving into the role.
After nearly seven years, Gerald Pfeifer is stepping down as board chair at openSUSE.
“2,442 days is a fair amount of time, and that’s how long I had been on the openSUSE Board as its chair,” Pfeifer wrote in an email sent on Wednesday to the openSUSE project mailing list. “That journey began on August 19th, 2019, and it ends today as I am stepping down as chair of the openSUSE Board.”
Pfeifer will be replaced by Jeff Mahoney, who was elected to his first term on the board in 2024, the last time a board election was held.
“The board election in 2024 had few people step up to run for the open seats, so I figured I might as well volunteer,” Mahoney said in February in an interview on the openSUSE website. “I’d been a part of the community for many years and had some ideas I wanted to propose. The project was in need of volunteers, so I stepped up.”
openSUSE’s board is composed of five members who are voted to two-year terms by the openSUSE community. The chairperson is also a voting board member, but is appointed by SUSE. Both Pfeifer and Mahoney are longtimers at SUSE. Pfeifer has been with the company for longer than 22 years, the last seven years in the C-suite as CTO. Mahoney is a 25-year SUSE veteran, who’s been an engineering VP for the last three-and-a-half years.
Days of Future Past
In his goodbye email, Pfeifer notes that the time he’s spent as openSUSE’s chair has been marked by some major events, both on the world stage and within the SUSE ecosystem:
“During those years we have seen SUSE and openSUSE carve out from Micro Focus (escalations on the IT side included); a global pandemic; SUSE go public and return to private; the arrival of Rancher, NeuVector, and Losant; four CIOs and four (and de facto more) General Managers for Linux at SUSE; repeated discussions on the logo and name of our project; the creation of Geeko Foundation; people move on and others step up; seven board elections; board meetings become public; passionate debates and growing pains; web site refreshes; the number of distros and tooling around them grow and evolve; and quite a bit more.”
The “discussions on the logo and name” he mentions are evidently a reference to an incident that got picked up — and largely blown out of proportion — by some media outlets about two years ago, when it was reported that SUSE was threatening openSUSE with a loss of funding if it didn’t change its name and logo.
“No big bad SUSE suits involved, no legal involved, no whatever involved,” Pfiefer told me at the time. “This is something colleagues have proposed on behalf of SUSE, because they firmly believe it’s in the best interest of SUSE and openSUSE. This is the beginning of a conversation, not a mandate from the SUSE side.”
That seems to have turned out to be the case. OpenSUSE is still called openSUSE, and its logo is still a green Gecko.
Days of Future Ahead
In his goodbye salute, Pfeifer leaves a note of advice, which he boils down to “embrace open, non-violent communication and trust — both given and received.”
“I encourage more lateral sharing (of accomplishments, changes, challenges, calls for collaboration) between the cells and bodies that make up openSUSE, and above all applying the principle of charity,” he said. “That is, giving others the benefit of the doubt, assuming good intentions, and looking for real value in their perspectives.
“Does that always come easy?” he asked. “Absolutely not. Does it make a difference? A lot.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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